Alex Dimitriadis presents at ISRS and ESTRO

Alex Dimitriadis, Senior Medical Physicist at The Thornbury Gamma Knife Centre has presented at the 13th Meeting of the International Stereotactic Radiosurgery Society (ISRS), held in Montreux, Switzerland between the 28th May to 1st June and at ESTRO 36 held in Vienna between the 5-9th May.

He presented the lessons learnt during a national cross-platform radiosurgery end-to-end audit undertaken across England comprising of 26 centres. SRS in England has undergone a rapid increase since its introduction in 1985 and following national commissioning and the introduction of a new service model the number of patients benefiting from SRS/SRT nationally is set to increase from just over 2,400 in 2014/15 to 6,200 patients a year by 2018/9, forming a concrete step towards the implementation of NHS England’s Cancer Strategy. There was variation in the practices followed between different centres for most aspects of radiosurgery and objectives of the audit were to setup a suitable methodology for a cross-platform end-to-end dosimetry audit, investigate variations in stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) practices identifying errors/potential errors to enhanace standardisation and national confidence in the delivery of SRS. The audit included 16 linac-based SRS , 7 Gamma Knife, 4 Cyberknife and one Tomotherapy. It found that the linac subgroup shows most variation, CK and GK less with “problems” identified in 3 centres. Variations in prescription practices were found to be an order of magnitude larger than inaccuracies observed in phantom with the results highlighting the need for standardisation of prescription practices.